by Richard Koscher, Publisher

During the recent Olympic games I was able to exalt over the medals being brought home by competitors from both my Austrian birthplace and from my adopted American homeland. The Austrians dominated the Alpine Skiing events, and the Americans ruled the snowboard events, so I had things to be happy about many days.

The performance of the NHL players on the US hockey team, on the other hand, was a disappointment for everyone. Their lame play mirrored the fiasco of the American NBA team in the summer Olympics two years ago. The US team opened with a tie against Latvia. Who knows where that country even is? They went on to beat Kazakhstan, but lost games to Slovakia, Sweden, Russia, and Finland.

Four players for the San Jose Sharks played in the Olympics representing their home countries. The presence of NHL professionals harms the pure Olympic experience because the result resembles a poorly played NHL game. The play lacks the tight coordination that marks truly excellent hockey, in which the five offensive players work together as a single unit. Gifted amateurs who practice together for a few months can achieve that kind of synchronization, but you can’t get it with professionals who on the previous week were playing on other teams in other parts of the world.

Such disunity might have accounted for the lack of energy that seemed to mark Team USA’s play. In one sad game the team played with a five on three advantage for a total of four minutes without scoring a single goal and eventually losing the match 2 to 1. That’s just embarrassing!

I don’t know which is the sadder fact – that Team USA turned in such a deficient performance or that almost nobody paid any attention while they did so. I think that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman should end the practice of stopping NHL play during the Olympics.

I’m more disappointed with NBC’s coverage of the Olympics than I am with the hockey games. NBC shelled out $613 million for the rights to carry the Turin Games. It was shocking that “Grey’s Anatomy” and “House” outrated the Olympic broadcasts. In fact, “American Idol” attracted almost twice as many viewers as the Olympics. I believe that the inept job NBC did of covering the event resulted in some of those poor ratings.

It’s infuriating for those of us who love sports to get jacked around by NBC’s over-produced and under-covered games. Instead of providing start-to-finish coverage of all the games, the network focused upon events in which they imagined Americans would be particularly interested. The coverage seemed to be managed by people who don’t really like sports, and who imagine that nobody would be interested in simply watching people from various countries compete with each other.

As a result, the network kept inserting fluffy documentaries into the middle of the action. They would take ten minutes describing in detail about the problems one of the competitors had as a child or good places to eat when you visit Turin. For example, someone reported that 30 minutes of taped coverage for a curling event included nine minutes of fluff pieces, 10 minutes of commercials, and 11 minutes footage showing actual play.

It bothered me that NBC barely provided any live coverage of the games. I would have gotten up at 4 a.m. to watch the Austrians and Americans compete in Men’s Downhill, but wasn’t able to do so because the network was simply rebroadcasting the previous day’s coverage, and continued to do so until 5 a.m., when they went into their series of morning news programs.

Even when I got home in the afternoon, NBC wasn’t showing any sports, but had two hours of news programs, followed by a fluff piece called the Olympic Zone, before finally showing the actual events themselves at 8 p.m.

Even though NBC wasn’t willing to provide complete coverage of the games, their $613 million had bought them a dog-in-the-manger monopoly over broadcast of the games so that none of the other stations could show events that NBC had chosen not to show themselves.

The solution for some people was to watch the thing on DVR or TiVo. That way they could advance through the ads and fluff and concentrate on watching the 15 or 20 minutes of real action shown every hour. An even better alternative for people who had big dishes was to tune into CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) broadcasts of the games which, by all accounts, were much more extensive and simply provided unvarnished start-to-finish coverage of the games without unnecessary comment.

Too often people with big bucks put the needs of big business – enormous businesses, actually – ahead of any love for the actual sports leaving fans like me to voice complaints that, of course, fall on ears that are stopped up with money.